Never say he didn't warn us. Going back decades, President Donald Trump has publicly declared that his one overriding philosophy of life was the necessity of getting revenge on anyone he believes has wronged him. As he told Charlie Rose back in 1992, "I love getting even with people."
Since his first run for president in 2015, he's made it quite clear that he intended to exact revenge on his political opponents. He showed a little bit of discretion during that first campaign, declaring that his rival Hillary Clinton "has to go to jail" ostensibly for her email server, but it was obvious even then that he wanted to use the presidency for payback.
He actually attempted to do it and was thwarted by the proverbial "guardrails." The New York Times reported that in his first term, Trump did demand that the Justice Department prosecute Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey but was steered away from it by his White House Counsel Don McGahn, who told him he didn't have the authority to order such a thing. He finally managed to get his Attorney General Bill Barr to name a special prosecutor to investigate Robert Mueller's Russia probe. They spent years trying to prove wrongdoing and ultimately failed because there wasn't any.
It wasn't until his third run for president that he really cranked up the threats. In his "comeback" speech at CPAC in 2023, Trump made no bones about what he planned if he were to win the White House again:
In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution....I am your retribution.
By that time, of course, his own list of grievances was a mile long, having been sued repeatedly and charged with several crimes related to actions he took as president and afterwards. Although he had a long history of lawsuits filed against him and being found liable, and his crude personal behavior toward women was well documented, he persuaded his followers that he was being railroaded for political purposes. He framed his campaign as a restoration to the White House after the election was stolen from him in 2020, and tens of millions of people believed the lie.
At his first big rally of the campaign held in Waco, Texas, near the site of the government's siege against the Branch Davidian cult, Trump repeated his "I am your retribution" line and added:
“the Biden regime’s weaponization of law enforcement against their political opponents is something straight out of the Stalinist Russia horror show. … From the beginning it’s been one witch hunt and phony investigation after another. … The abuses of power that we are witnessing at all levels of government will go down as among the most shameful, corrupt, and depraved chapters” in all of history."
His henchman Stephen Miller does know how to produce a florid turn of phrase, doesn't he?
There were plenty of people pointing out that Trump was bent on revenge. He didn't try to hide it. And some of his supporters in the media tried everything they could to get him to say that he wasn't, that he was just going to restore impartial justice. He wouldn't do it.
Fox News' Sean Hannity practically begged him:
We need your help to stay independent
Dr Phil tried to give him a good talking point, but he wasn't buying it:
In fact, on many appearances such as this one on Newsmax, he was explicit about his regrets for not throwing Hillary Clinton in jail and seemed to be suggesting that he still wanted to do it:
Even though he was saying these things, there were many Republicans who insisted that he had no intention of getting retribution. And even he would say from time to time, "My revenge will be success" just to keep everyone guessing.
Since he's been in office, he's completely dissolved any barrier between himself and the Department of Justice, and his Attorney General Pam Bondi is honored to be his loyal hatchet woman. She has inappropriately trashed the reputation of any judge who rules against the administration and fired prosecutors who worked on the Jan. 6 cases. And she is helping him with his crusade against the big law firms who represented clients who opposed him. Trump is withdrawing their security clearances and threatening to bar them from government facilities, putting any business with the government at risk. It's extortion, plain and simple, by the president and the Department of Justice and many of the firms have capitulated, agreeing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in pro-bono work, essentially becoming his personal army of lawyers, to do his bidding. As the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said:
“Big Law continues to bend the knee to President Trump because they know they were wrong, and he looks forward to putting their pro bono legal concessions toward implementing his America First agenda.”
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But this week, Trump finally went the distance and publicly issued presidential memos instructing his Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute two political appointees he believes betrayed him in the first term. The first was cybersecurity expert Christopher Krebs, who testified truthfully that the 2020 election was secure despite Trump and his mindless acolytes' conspiracy theories that the voting machines had been "rigged." Trump instructed Bondi to investigate if Krebbs had violated the Espionage Act by providing classified information to someone who was not authorized to receive it. (The incredible chutzpah of Trump accusing him of the very crime that he has committed numerous times is impressive, even for him. But then, that's probably the point.) He stripped Krebs of his security clearance, and in an act of sheer, gratuitous malice, he did the same to the people Krebs works with at his security firm.
The First Amendment is apparently no longer operative, at least for critics of Donald Trump.
The other person Trump is demanding to be investigated is Miles Taylor, the former Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff who wrote the famous anonymous op-ed in the New York Times saying that there were people in the administration who were keeping Trump from going off the rails. When Trump announced his instructions, he said that he believes Taylor committed treason.
Both men are being investigated for things they said that Donald Trump doesn't like. The First Amendment is apparently no longer operative, at least for critics of Donald Trump.
The orders aren't really meaningful in any legal sense. He could have just phoned Bondi and told her to look into them and taken away their clearances without a ceremony. But this is meant as a shot across the bow. Krebs and Taylor were Republicans, hired by Trump, and they were, in his view, disloyal to him personally. As he said in that Charlie Rose interview all those years ago, that is the ultimate crime in his book, and he's going to "wipe the floor with them."
For the moment, it's Republicans being put on notice: cross him and you will pay the price. They're listening. Democrats are almost certainly going to be next.
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